Comp Cams Factory Tour: How Does a Performance Camshaft Get Made?

this will make a good camshaft in about 15 minutes you gotta really care about what you're doing so kenny's been here for 46 years oh my god they got a suburban in here how did you know we were coming there was some crazy stuff that went on with it it's memphis yeah that's like i said we are standing in the warehouse at comp cams right now and we're about to learn everything there is to learn about camshafts billy godbold and lakespeed camshafts are really neat you know you start looking at it and people think that cam designers design lobes they don't they design the valve motion so we designed a camera designing valve motion but when you design the bowel motion you figure out okay what's wrong with the valve to do here's the rocker you back it through the system it's through something called you know my background is physics you call it a coordinate transformation back to how the lifter needs to move and that creates this cam surface profile that you need to grind well you've got to grind it on something so what we do instead of starting with a bar of steel what we'll do is we'll start out with a bar of steel that's already got the lobe spaced out the journal the gear made the journals ground the front work done in work done and all it's left to do is grind the finished lobes on it so when you look at a camcore like this you know it has the front work done the rear work done the journal's turned everything's made on this but the camshaft lobes aren't ground so this would be a cam core i believe that's for a four-cylinder echo boost if you look at this this is for a ford modular 4.6 or 5.4 those are not fun to change nope it's sort of like michelangelo carving david out of the marble you know what he say he looked at the big stone of marmalade cut away everything that wasn't david you know he didn't add anything to it same thing here we want to start with the bar of steel and cut away everything that's not your finished camshaft there you go and we're going to find out how that happens right here yep we talked about going from starting with a bar of steel and cutting away everything that isn't camshaft the camcorder you saw actually was already through heat tree get an idea what's happened before that is you can imagine a big bar like this look at this akuma lt 300 and so when you slide the bar in you start out with the front you do the front work then you come in pull it out a little bit do all the spacing work pull out more do more spacing work then you finish up with the rear after it goes through all of that we have what we call a spool so this is a camshaft with the barrel done all the linear set but still the loads are round so around low core is full from this point the next thing happens it goes over the moorey mill over here and they go in and mill the lobes up after the lobes are milled to size for the rough size then it goes off the heat tree so if it's a 86 20 core it'll be copper plated then go to heat treat if it's tool steel it doesn't have to be plated it just goes and straight to heat treat they go and quench and temper it they bring it up to a transition temperature do a quick twin quench and then do a triple temper to bring it down the hardest range you're shooting for this is cool what era is this machine from these were made back in the 1950s so this would have been a verto cam grinder it's got a degree head that sets your angles on here so the camshaft fits in between centers depending on sitting on the steady rest here there's an index plate on the back that sets it up for each angle so if you see this pin right here you can grab that pin and change to each angle in the firing order so as they go to each lobe they'll run to the position on this on the end here you've got two you've got a stock for two masters so the master is this place that goes right on here so you have an intake and exhaust master and they go on this and there's a follow wheel that's the same size as the grinding wheel so there's a 17 inch follow wheel riding on here the grinding wheels right here it's dressed with this diamond set up right here this traverses across to touch the wheel and then the operator will go through there put the machine in gear and so this the original cam that lake had in 2002 it was ground on one of these machines since there was nobody using this machine to comp right now here's some footage from the holmen moody shop where larry wallace is grinding a cam that i got a couple weeks ago you can kind of see how the machine works and how he turns that knob to bring the wheel in ever so slowly i mean it's really like this is this is it this is how it works and this is how those cnc machines work on the other side of the shop but you can't see inside there because of all the cool spraying around so now you know what it looks like it's pretty wild looking so to do it it really requires having really good verco master um you know if you don't have a good master if you have a great master this machine can make an awesome handshake the only negative of this machine is you can only make about six to eight good cam shafts a day you know because it's not terribly fast you can see all the coolant is just coming out of this little spigot right here so not a whole lot without running the guy on the opposite side of it when you look at the cnc you're a lot more cooler you got a lot more horse side got a lot a lot really neat for your piece because those set your your low profiles come from these yes so like i told you about the low profile you start the valve motion you get back through the valve train to low profile as you get that low profile then you have to go well can i grind that with this grinder if you can you just make the master to do it if you can't you have to change your design to make it work but this is another transformation so this isn't exactly like the load this is what profile is needed to make this table rock in order to produce that cam look and it's funny you know when i started in 95 we have these little yellow lights on here the guy would pull the string for the yellow light and say they needed a new master and over on the side board here there was a piece of pegboard two four by four squares had all our masters you know now if you look there's those offices over there all of those officers in that corner are filled up with masters there's about twelve thousand double matches wow so you know because they wow all the time wow but you see we had one time we had the 16 of these manual machines they're great but they require the only issue with these machines they require making this master first and it has the camshaft can never be better than you make this master the other problem with it is is as you're running it the person who's running this cam grinder is turning these dials to set the entity having a guy standing here on his feet for eight hours a day and turning this and never going faster or slower doing it the exact same every time gets really really boring and so very few people had the patience to learn to do this right and then the patients to do it right every time so that kind of moved us into a different era um starting in the early 2000s we started to get these grinders over here let me run you over here really these big six-inch pipes there's a thousand gallons per minute of coolant going through these pipes at um 80 psi so when these pipes breaks it looks like a flood that happened before no those are all schedule agents so these are the machines that are the next generation so if you go over here and look at this setup so instead of all the handles on it everything's controlled with the american controller the grinding wheel instead being a conventional piece now is a cbm piece this this grinder will run 50 gallons per minute of coolant through it so instead of watching it take material off now all you see is like niagara falls yeah for 50 gallons per minute you can almost water speed out of what's coming out of it yeah you can't even see anything going on in there but what's neat is if you can go over here and put your ear to it you can actually because your aircraft you actually hear the materials coming off of it as it goes around you you're kind of yeah so it lines up where you're actually watching it here you can see like this grinding wheel is going 3000 you know 160 rpm and it also shows you how well balanced it is too so we can measure things on this and do things you know that machine we could never go never to put 50 gallons per minute you know cool to it we never could have gone 3000 rpm we couldn't control things as well so what's the turnaround time how many cans can one of these make in a day this will make a good camshaft in about 15 minutes it's a little more than a minute to load so let's say 20 minutes so instead of instead of six or eight a day you know we're going you know three an hour wow yeah so it's amazing the other thing you do is if you see my friend over here so kenny and i have known each other forever kenny's actually the first employee that cockham's ever hired so when rhs decided they were going to grind camshafts and everything they were going to form compounds you know you start looking at and go well what do we need to hire well we probably ought to hire somebody who can grind cans so before comp you were at cam dynamics and so you've been here for 40 years 46 years about taking any shoes off or anything um so kenny's been here for 46 years now when we were grinding everything on those manual machines like kenny did every pro stocks cam for bob good you know steve schmidt grumpy jenkins you know uh you know all of the guys for that whole series also all the nascar cams for all the children all the ralph all the yates all the bi now when you realize we talked about doing this by hand how it you have to move that end feet so smoothly one night about two in the morning we were doing some camshafts for cars raising not like go-kart like the c-a-r-t yeah yeah like indycar type stuff yeah and it was like two in the morning i don't think we could say who were doing it for but like two a.m and he took a tenth off of the lobe all the way around um yeah i was in there checking with the ag holder but the nice thing about having the cnc's is you can take somebody who could run those burr codes and then have him come over here and work with somebody like me and make these machines do with numerical control what he was doing with his hands over there and with the same tricks like sticking your ear up to it listening to it being hands on it feeling it yeah these machines will talk to you if you'll listen right interesting can you beat the machine no but i'm come close but the machine couldn't beat deal i know today when i was running uh when i was running a virgo out there i was real close to doing this my numbers wasn't out into the tent where we are now wow that's cool so today you still have the same guys who are running our berko machines they've moved over the cnc's they're training a new generation and they're able to take what they were able to do on that old world craftsmanship and put it into new world some of the best grinding technology available so he's taking them out of here and putting them in these bins what are where do these go when he's got this whole thing full what happens to them so what you'll look at is you'll see these big carts these are kind of a station car you'll see these smaller carts running around here so as soon as they grab that camcorder off the shelf in there so a salesman puts in the order it creates a serial number and it creates an order in our system they go and look and see what core number was on that system they pull that core number they go over the laser marker and they mark that coil as soon as that core is marked so this door has been pulled off the shelf it's been marked on the back as soon as it's marked it goes over to the guys that billy kaiser over here will do camp straight so they'll straighten this camshaft and make sure the camcore is straight before it goes in the grinder the guys the engineer create all the files for the programs for it they put those on the network kenya will go over here then billy will bring these camshafts once they're straightened over here in the car for kenny kenny will get the cam shaft he'll pull up all the information in one of these computers between each of the machines that tells us what the program is they'll get that program they'll put it on a jump drive they'll take it over to the ecmc control they'll load that program into the akuma then he'll load this set up he'll dry wheel it in make sure it lines up get all his angles right then he'll close the door push go and then 20 minutes later he opens it up and hopefully it comes out like that is he managing multiple machines yes that's a neat thing you know um one of the things is like you're trying to find out how to get how do you get four kenny aarondale's or how do you get eight kenny erindales well one we haven't figured out cloning yet and two it's probably not ethical but instead of cloning kenny which kenny wasn't all good with um we thought about chopping him up and putting parts everywhere we took harvey's finger off and then you know try to throw it out it didn't work well um i've been flipped off with my finger several times um but instead of cloning pinning what we can do is have kenny set up load this machine run it set up row this machine right so one operator can run about three machines so with these eight grinders that are in this cell about three operators and a runner can keep this thing going pretty much you know constantly we just brought two of these new labels now these machines the akumas use a ball screw the landis runs a linear drive on it and it's got a smaller wheel so 350 millimeter has 250 millimeters this can run instead of 3000 rpm this line will go about 5 000 rpm so this machine can grind two camshafts at the same time that machine can grind one to the same accuracy it's smaller too yeah it's a smaller piece pretty neat little it's a smaller faster neat little piece the thing is those machines were about half a million dollars each these are about 1.2 million each but really if you think about the time this one will grind more cams per million dollar spent than that one will per year so you know the problem with this one is it's a little slower on setup so it's better for high volume that's better for your one-off feature okay and if you slow the machines down over here you know just running at about a cam in about 20 minutes just running a cam in about eight minutes is roughly the same quality so they're very very close interesting and you think going slower would be better but honestly it's not because as you run this camshaft the faster you can turn this camshaft around while it's grinding the more you get cooling in there so being able to spin the camshaft faster and have the wheel stay with it actually grinds a little bit better camshaft than turning slower and taking less off because the heat input it's just you're putting the same amount of heat but you're getting that coolant back you're putting heat into this region for less time before you move to the next region so you really want to grind the cam as fast as you can not as slow as you can what do the old-school machines get used for now really they're used for like a lot of times we'll have tractor cams and things like that say something will come up that we we're used to grinding crane that we don't have the design data for but we have the masters we use them basically for the really oddball stuff tractors you know they'll have buicks um you know anything that you just really don't have the ability to run on one of the cnc's for the most part it's less expensive and makes a better part to grind it on a cnc that's why we don't have 16 verticos anymore this is the fun stuff right here you know this this probably is my favorite room the two my two favorite rooms in comp camps would be the test sales we have in the back in our quality room and when i first started at comp in 1995 i wanted cnc grinders and i want them so bad i could taste them i tried everything in the world to get my boss scooter brothers to buy a couple of cnc grinders and it really wasn't going well and so what happened is eventually he just took me aside he said billy you want to make ball bearings you want to measure them with the wood calipers and he said something that was probably one of the most influential things i've ever been told he said billy you can't make something better than you can measure it and that led to basically this room in here in 1998 he and i flew to marlborough massachusetts to meet with the addison cole corporation and we sat down and talked to them about what they have been just making is the state of the art rotary cmm's for camshafts and you can see our first one over here so we bought this unit in 1998 so this this camshaft was measured on it um you can see it has the degree head down here has got two high and high and diffraction grading encoders on it on about a 12 inch head this can measure an angle down way way not to the millionths but not even to the trillions but actually further than that into a degree actually calculated one time it's a wavelength of light on 12 inches time two because you have opposite encoders on it you have the same height and height encoders on the probe that goes out and measures the camshaft so we had these before we had the cnc grinders and it works very much the same way you know when the guys when the when the cam comes into qc after it's been grounded the operator goes in here and he puts in the information about camshafts types of serial number and it will tell them everything about the camshaft then they take that and they go over to them to the ag hole and they input what's the core number and what's the sequence when they start the routine to ask it what's the intake design id what's exhaust id what's the load separation advance it then creates a temporary part data file and it measures the camshaft 3.3 cuts a load to a quarter or a tenth of degree depending on the machine so either 1440 points or 3600 points on all three cuts on every load [Music] and it compares that to actually the design so whatever whatever chris spider crystal skier i design it will check this lobe every quarter degree three places the lobe every load how many times do you come in here yelling at somebody that they didn't grind it right i mean honestly with something like this the problem is is when engineering has so much to do with the programming when the cnc ground there's almost none of that because you can imagine that what happens is if this turns out bad i probably did something bad in engineering because the grinder is going to follow that profile so honestly it's almost the other way around when something comes up when red ink starts printing coming out of that printer these guys call up our department engineering and say what did you guys do wrong because of everybody who's liable to make a mistake kenny making a mistake is once every five years chris sileski making mistake is once every year to two me making a mistake was like once every 45 minutes or so yeah so you know most of the mistakes would be traced back to me what was really cool about this machine is when we were doing oil development this was how you could see what the oil was doing so we would do is take camshafts that you would design and grind here we would add call all 16 lobes first then we put them in the engine we run this durability test very precise speed load time sequence take the cam back out flat back here check all 16 lobes again so you could see exactly how much wear was occurring on the camshaft and when he when he says exactly how much you have to understand that these encoders are diffraction grading encoders so they…